Editorial standards

How these pieces are made.

Helix deep dives make quantitative claims about human physiology. That is a category where it is easy to be confidently wrong, so the rules below are fixed before the writing starts and apply to every piece.

1. 01

   Every chart says whether it is a measurement or a model

   Under each visual there is a source line. It states plainly whether the values are published figures, approximations of published figures, composites assembled from a range, or arithmetic from stated assumptions. If a curve is drawn to match reported percentages rather than plotted from raw participant data, it says so.

2. 02

   Models publish their coefficients

   Where a piece uses a model to make an argument, the numbers behind it are printed on the page, along with a note on what happens to the conclusion if you change them. A reader should be able to disagree with the assumptions without having to guess what they were.

3. 03

   References link by title search, never by typed identifier

   Every citation resolves through a PubMed or Google Scholar title search rather than a hand-entered DOI or PMID. A mistyped identifier silently resolves to the wrong paper, which is a worse failure than a link that takes one extra click. Each reference also states what the article used it for.

4. 04

   Composites are labelled in the interface, not the footnotes

   When a figure blends a pattern across several studies rather than reporting one cohort, it carries a visible tag in the chart itself. Nobody should have to read a methods note to discover that a bar is illustrative.

5. 05

   Every piece contains a chapter on where it breaks down

   Each deep dive includes an explicit limitations chapter: what the research does not show, where effects are weaker than the popular version claims, who the conclusion does not apply to, and where the evidence is contested. If a topic has no real limitations, it is probably not worth a deep dive.

6. 06

   We look for where our own headline is wrong

   Counterintuitive claims are usually false in some important way. Rather than hide that, we make it a chapter. The training piece argues that elites do more hard work than amateurs in absolute terms, which contradicts its own title. The heart rate piece shows that most alerts from a genuinely accurate detector are false alarms.

7. 07

   Corrections are made in place and disclosed

   If a figure turns out to be wrong we fix it on the page and note what changed. During research for the protein piece a widely repeated claim about heavy metals in supplements traced back to a misattribution, and the underlying study reports no such finding, so it is not in the article and the reference note records why.

8. 08

   Nothing here is medical advice

   These are general interest articles about physiology and nutrition research. They are not personalised guidance, and they are not a substitute for a clinician who knows your history. Every piece says so.